Sorted Collections

Lean

The integrated search engine capabilities are sparse. Phraseanet supports operators such as AND, OR, EXCEPT, LAST, and ALL, along with wildcards * and ?. The simple search mask also includes a history of recent requests. An advanced search is available in both the Production and Classic modules and filters (among other things) by date, documents or reports, or collections and tags. The developers have announced a revised elastic search for the 3.9 release planned for 2015, which is said to offer multilingualism, geodetic information, and filters for similar shapes and colors.

Phraseanet admins can assign rights by collection. In this way, users can receive read-only permission or permission to upload new files or edit existing files. Access controls or download options are optionally subject to limitation. However, a way to set passwords is missing. The DAM system instead sends invitations and requests to change passwords via email.

Phraseanet will optionally watermark your images. You can also choose Admin | Databases , open a collection, and click the User entry. By clicking in the checkbox on the upper edge, you can turn the No watermark feature on and off. The name of the collection appears as a stamp by default. To set up your own watermark, navigate in the Admin menu to the collection, check Watermark file , scroll down a bit and upload your own file in the file browser.

There is no connection to an ordering system or a store, and no version control. A file's single-pane view only provides an overview of any changes made on the History tab. There is no option for undoing this.

ResourceSpace

ResourceSpace [2] is released under the BSD license, implemented in PHP, and feels at home with Apache and MySQL in a typical LAMP environment. Additionally, the application requires the PHP GD libraries, Ghostscript, Antiword, Xpdf, the Libav tools, FFmpeg, ImageMagick, Postfix, and UFRaw, provided you want the tool to process raw files. Vendor Montala Limited [8] alternatively offers commercial hosting and support.

Users can download a ZIP file containing the sources from the project website or check out the latest code via subversion. I chose the latter route and received version 6.3-5565. In doing so, I noted that it is easy to get your fingers burnt on red-hot sources: A bug paralyzed the entire installation. However, the developers fixed this within a week.

If you find this approach too tricky, you can consider the manufacturer's hosting service; you will find a price list for different scenarios on the website [9]. The Bitnami project pages supply users with installers for Linux, Windows, and OS X, as well as a virtual machine for VMware [10].

To set up the DAM system yourself, you should stick to the manual from the wiki [11]. You'll have a fully functional installation in the blink of an eye and can then log in with admin as your username and password. After changing the password, admins need to go to the Team Center menu and select Installation Check . This way, you will see whether read and write permissions are missing, whether all the required tools are installed, and whether the PHP configuration fits the bill. If ResourceSpace reports that it cannot find a third-party program, you can adjust the path to the tools in the include/config.default.php file on the server.

Review

ResourceSpace is available in more than 20 languages and supports several ways of importing files. As well as Flash-based uploaders, users also have the option of loading via FTP or from a local directory via Team Center | Manage Resources . The developers recommend the browser-based upload, and they point out that FTP and local import are only in there for historical reasons. In the test, the latter variant offered no noticeable speed advantage over a browser upload. The bottleneck is rather the available computing power for generating preview images.

The DAM system reads metadata such as the description, tags, and geolocation. Users only have to enter the title in the upload form, which is somewhat impractical for large volumes of data because all the files have the same name afterward. You can rename the content manually or modify the configuration as described in the wiki under Customising Types and Fields .

The upload form provides additional fields for describing files. Admins decide which they are in Team Center | System Setup in the Resources types/fields section. The software is clever and presents appropriate fields for individual types. This way, the Photography category already contains fields for the flash and the camera, for example (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Users can adjust the metadata fields for ResourceSpace via the system setup.

ResourceSpace supports more than 90 image and document types and approximately 120 audio and video formats. Ubuntu users can find information in the wiki about how to expand the system so that, with help from Calibre [12], it integrates various ebook formats. The software generates preview images in several sizes when importing graphics and images; with document icons (sometimes with or without preview) and with videos, it even generates short previews. Admins configure which dimensions the thumbnails have in the system setup in the Downloads/preview sizes section.